1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of electronic messages, and more particularly to prioritizing electronic messages, for example, for sharing and recommending electronic messages.
2. Description of the Related Art
There exist many systems for sharing electronic messages among a community of users. Examples of message sharing systems include Internet forums, electronic mailing lists, blogs and microblogs, and social networks. In any of these systems, users may post messages that can be read by other users of the system. For example, in a social networking website, a user may post a message that can be read by other users that are socially networked to the posting user through the website. In some systems, a user can subscribe to the postings of another user (which can be an individual, a company, or some other entity) and subsequently receive some or all of the postings of that user. For example, a user subscribed to another user in a social network may receive all of the postings of that user. A user that subscribes to postings of another user is also referred to as a “subscriber” (or “follower”) of that user.
A user may be a subscriber of many other users and may receive many posted messages. These messages may be stored for later retrieval and viewing by the receiving user. For example, the receiving user may periodically login to a website and view messages that were recently posted by those users that the receiving user is subscribing to. In some cases, messages may be delivered to the user as they are posted, for example by sending a short message service (SMS) text message containing each posted message to the user. A user may receive more messages than the user desires to receive or has time to spend reading. Often, receiving users would prefer to see interesting messages rather than having to give equal focus to all messages.
Receiving users can take various actions to try and view interesting messages while limiting uninteresting messages. They can choose to receive messages posted by particular users or messages with particular keywords, for example. However, these actions often result in the user missing many interesting messages while still receiving uninteresting ones. Thus, there in is lacking, inter alia, configurations that present messages to users that the users are likely to find interesting.